British scientists exploring an underwater mountain in the Atlantic Ocean have discovered a treasure trove of rare minerals.

Their
investigation of a seamount more than 500km (300 miles) from the Canary
Islands has revealed a crust of "astonishingly rich" rock.
Samples
brought back to the surface contain the scarce substance tellurium in
concentrations 50,000 times higher than in deposits on land.
Tellurium
is used in a type of advanced solar panel, so the discovery raises a
difficult question about whether the push for renewable energy may
encourage mining of the seabed.
The rocks also contain what are called rare earth elements that are used in wind turbines and electronics. Energy implications

Known
as Tropic Seamount, the mountain stands about 3,000m tall – about the
size of one of the middle-ranging Alpine summits – with a large plateau
at its top, lying about 1,000m below the ocean surface.
Using
robotic submarines, researchers from the UK's National Oceanography
Centre found that the crust is dark and fine-grained and stretches in a
layer roughly 4cm thick over the entire surface of the mountain.
Dr
Bram Murton, the leader of the expedition, told the BBC that he had
been expecting to find abundant minerals on the seamount but not in such
concentrations.
"These crusts are astonishingly rich and that's
what makes these rocks so incredibly special and valuable from a
resource perspective."
He has calculated that the 2,670 tonnes of tellurium on this single seamount represents one-twelfth of the world's total supply.
And
Dr Murton has come up with a hypothetical estimate that if the entire
deposit could be extracted and used to make solar panels, it could meet
65% of the UK's electricity demand.

Tropic Seamount: The mountain stands about 3,000m tall

source : NOC / NERC

He says he is not advocating deep-sea mining, which has yet to start
anywhere in the world and is likely to be highly controversial because
of the damage it could cause to the marine environment.
But Dr Murton does want his team's discovery, part of a major research project called MarineE-Tech, to trigger a debate about where vital resources should come from.
"If
we need green energy supplies, then we need the raw materials to make
the devices that produce the energy so, yes, the raw materials have to
come from somewhere.
"We either dig them up from the ground and
make a very large hole or dig them from the seabed and make a
comparatively smaller hole.
"It's a dilemma for society - nothing we do comes without a cost."
Scientists are now weighing up the relative risks and merits of mining on land as opposed to on the seabed.

Scientists fear that even before one of the last frontiers of exploration, the ocean deep, has been properly studied it will already have been exploited by commercial deep-sea mining looking for rare

Mines on land often require forests and villages to be cleared,
overlying rocks to be removed and roads or railways to be built in order
to extract ores with relatively weak concentrations of minerals.
By
contrast, mines on the seabed would extract far richer ores, covering a
smaller area and with no immediate impact on people - but instead
killing marine life wherever digging machines are deployed and
potentially devastating a far wider area.
One major concern is the
effect of plumes of dust, stirred up by excavation of the ocean floor,
spreading for long distances and smothering all life wherever it
settles.
To understand the implications, the expedition to
Tropic Seamount conducted an experiment, the first of its kind, to mimic
the effects of mining and to measure the resulting plume.
Deploying
from the UK research ship James Cook, a remotely operated vehicle
deliberately pumped out hundreds of litres of sediment-filled water
every minute while other robotic sensors were positioned downstream in
the ocean current.
According to Dr Murton, early results indicate
that dust was hard to detect 1km away from the source of the plume,
suggesting that the impact of mining could be more localised than many
fear.

But this comes as different disciplines within marine
science are coming up with a range of perspectives on this emerging
development.

The ocean has a wealth of resources.

From food, to travel, to pharmaceutical needs, and to energy, the ocean has always provided for mankind.

And now, mankind is turning to the ocean for minerals and metals needed for the technology we use in our everyday lives.

An exploration into the emerging industry of deep sea mining leads to more questions than answers.

Lucrative nodules

A study led by Dr Daniel Jones,
also at the NOC, reviewed evidence of seabed exploration and found that
in the wake of mining many marine creatures would be likely to recover
within a year but that few would return to their previous levels even
after two decades.Another study focused on tiny organisms on the floor of the Pacific Ocean in a region known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which stretches in a belt south of Hawaii.
Much
of this zone has been licensed by the UN's International Seabed
Authority to companies from more than a dozen countries to search for
minerals in the potato-sized rocks or "nodules" lying on the seabed.
Prof
Andy Gooday, also of the NOC, and colleagues found that among the
metals-rich nodules, there is a far greater diversity of single-celled
organisms called xenophyophores than previously thought.
Their research identified as many as 34 species of these lifeforms that are new to science.

The concern would be for the ecosystems that are built around any mined seamount

These organisms occupy one of the lower rungs in the food chain and
also play an important role by forming hard shell-like structures, like
miniature coral reefs, that provide habitats for other creatures.
Prof
Gooday says that the range of life in the sediments of the deep ocean
can be compared with that of a tropical rainforest and that "life on the
ocean floor is more dynamic" than anyone expected.
He believes it is unlikely that seabed mining would cause species to go extinct but that the impact locally would be severe.
"If
you eliminate these xenophyphores, which are very fragile and would
certainly be destroyed by mining, it would destroy habitat structure for
other organisms.
"It's difficult to predict and, like everything
in the deep sea connected with the effects of mining, we need to learn
more – we still know so little about what's going on down there."